Do Not Buy Facebook Page Likes—Ever! Here’s Why…

So, you’ve just started your new business and just set up your Facebook Fan Page. As you look at your competitors and view their posts, you begin to size up the market and ask yourself: “How does my competition (who is also a small startup brand) have so many Facebook Page likes?”

Well, as you may or may not know, you can actually purchase Facebook Page likes from companies like Fiverr or FbSkip. At face value, this may seem like a great idea to “authenticate” your brand, but it is actually one of the worst things you can do. Here’s why:

We currently live in a world that is hyper critical and very tech savvy; in which consumers are highly engaged with brands across multiple platforms and do lots of research before making a purchase. Consumers are looking for brands that have cool features, perhaps some public relations, influencers backing their product or service, and oddly enough Fan Page likes.

As such, many e-commerce brands buy Facebook Fan Page “likes,” which raises two major red flags. First, having a very disproportionate number of fan page likes, and having been established for a very short period of time significantly makes your brand appear unauthenticated and ultimately sets you up for major failure—especially as you seek to gain trust, credibility, and growth as a small brand.

Secondly, buying fake Facebook Page likes will adversely affect your marketing efforts on Facebook. For those new to advertising on Facebook, the platform offers many different types of marketing campaigns to meet your desired goals; whether to assist with qualified top-of-funnel traffic, retargeting, lead capture, and much more. There are also many features which allow marketers to build custom audiences based on URL visits, specific conversion events on site, and even email lists.

When you’re seeking a new audience similar to those who already know and like your brand, you can create what’s called a “lookalike audience.” A lookalike audience is an audience of new people who are likely to be interested in your product or service and serve as a very qualified audience for new acquisition. You can base your lookalike audience off of a number of sources including “people who like your page.” Well, if you’ve purchased “likes,” or generated an inorganic source of page likes, your lookalike audience based off “people who like your page” will be trash. Any efforts you put forth on paid media towards a new acquisition campaign built off of a lookalike audience from false page likes is essentially throwing money down the drain. It will likely produce low click-through rates (CTR), high cost per impressions (CPM), a low number of link clicks, and a very high cost per acquisition (CPA).

At the end of the day, you can’t fake it till you make in the world of e-commerce; people are much smarter than you think. Be true to your brand, be authentic, and results will come with hard work, patience, and a product or service that has a meaningful impact or solves a problem.